Elmcat of the Among Cats and Books Blog collected RSS feeds and wrote some code to create an amazing map of tabletop role-playing game blogs.

In full on firehose mode, it looks like this

Which is beautiful but overwhelming.

Of course, I had a look at where Grumpy Wizard is at in the graph.

Down in the bottom left of map; not surprisingly near other old school focused blogs.

The location of particular blogs in the cloud is not as quite what I would have expected.

Three of my all time favorite blogs (Delta’s D&D Hotspot, Gothridge Manor, and Bat in the Attic) are up toward the right hand corner.

The tool in the top right of the window allows you to look at the most linked posts on a particular blog, what blogs are linking to each other most often, what other communities they are linked too, and more.

The blog that links to me most often is Seed of Worlds. It’s one I follow and make sure to read the Shiny Links posts. It’s always a very good curated list of interesting reading. I don’t think Grumpy Wizard would have as many readers as it does without xaoseed’s links.

One thing I do that hasn’t been captured in the data is link to other blogs but I don’t often link to specific blog posts on other blogs. It shows I haven’t linked to other blog posts off the blog for some reason. I have done some of that but not nearly as much as I should.

Regardless, I am reminded and internally enjoined to make more of an effort to engage with other blogs. I am setting an intention to add, read, comment, and most importantly do more cross blog conversation by posting about and linking back to what others are writing about.

The most valuable part of the playing RPGs hobby are the connections we make with the people we play with. I would like to see those sort of connections become more common again in the talking about RPGs online hobby. I don’t think I’ve been doing as much as I could to contribute to positive collaboration between bloggers and other creators. That is a habit I intend to redress.